What Hath G-d Wrought!

The bad news first. It is "Small Arms Destruction Day" on July 9, 2001. Plans
are underway for government agents to ignite huge bonfires of handguns, rifles
and other firearms in major population centers worldwide. (http://jpfo.org/alert20010525.htm)

Now some lighter news. JPFO's "Ask the Rabbi" column has placed among the funniest
seven web pages on the Internet in Henry Alford's latest
release, Out There: One Man's Search to Find the Funniest
Person on the Internet. It is available as of today from
www.Amazon.com --

"This is some kind of weird joke", you're thinking. Yes, we are
inclined to agree with you.

When Samuel Morse sent the first message via his telegraph
invention from Washington D.C. to Baltimore in 1844 he coded
the verse "What hath G-d Wrought" (Numbers 23:23).

We will never know the first words of Tim Berners-Lee when he
invented the Internet in CERN, the European Particle Physics
Laboratory in Switzerland, in 1989. History was kind to him by
not recording that first sentence for posterity. He probably
got a busy signal. No verse from the Bible seemed to fit the
occasion. Whatever he said may have been unprintable.

A curious telephone (first patented by Alexander Graham Bell
in 1876) call sometime in 1998 from Rabbi Mermelstein to Aaron
Zelman, JPFO Executive Director, set the foundations of JPFO's
Ask the Rabbi page. It has gained hearty praise and acrimonious
vilification from opposing ends of the political and Jewish
spectrums since its inception.

The first posts were typewritten replies to questions from our
website's visitors received by our first webmaster whose name
will not be divulged to spare him any embarrassment. He faxed
them to Rabbi Mermelstein and they were dutifully faxed back
with replies. Said webmaster had to copy the faxes, word for
word, convert them to HTML and upload them to the website.
Friend (you know who you are), if you read this, we hope
you've forgiven us by now.

Rabbi Mermelstein's PC was a resurrected pre-Pentium 286 and
he had not the foggiest clue about the Internet or email. After
a few angry calls from that anonymous webmaster to Aaron Zelman
the problem was solved. Rabbi Mermelstein was about to be
dragged into the cyber culture kicking and screaming despite
his feeble protests regarding the constitutionality of such
coercion.

Our plans for JPFO's Ask the Rabbi page were the same as Tim
Berners-Lee's plan for the Internet in general: Global
information sharing. Our new page would be serious, informative
and innovative. If a bit of tasteful tongue in cheek humor could
be interjected where appropriate, all the better to maintain
reader interest. We never envisioned a slapstick comedy act in
hypertext markup language.

After the best laid plans of mice and men, JPFO's Rabbi Mermelstein
was voted the fourth funniest person on the Internet. In case you
are wondering who was voted the funniest, you'll have to buy the
book. Here's a hint: Rabbi Mermelstein isn't especially flattered.

Out There is not a book about the Second Amendment. It is written
as humor, pure and simple, by a freelance writer in New York City.

JPFO cannot give this work a Suitable for General Audiences rating.
Like the Internet itself parts of it are, shall we say, a bit risqué.

Why do we bother to mention this book at all, then?

In our business of disseminating the truth about the US
Constitution and the Bill of Rights we tend to draw lots of fire
from those who wish the truth never got out.

Out There, by Henry Alford, will bring our presence on the World
Wide Web to others who would have never otherwise found us.

And in the world of global information sharing every bit of
advertising helps.

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